Skunk Hunt (25 page)

There had always been an appalling finality
about Skunk's declarations. He could say he was going out to buy
ice cream and you would think he was getting ready to slit your
throat. Even via a recording, at third hand over a phone and
peppered with what seemed to be institutional background noise
(echoes from prison?), he could still shiver my timbers.

To fill in the awkward silence, and to
goad the tape recorder operator into continuing, I said, "Who is
this? I know it's not you, Dad, because I ID'd your body in front
of the coroner. And you were never one for practical jokes. Well,
there
was
the time you forced
beer down my throat in front of your drinking buddies. That wasn't
exactly practical. And I didn't exactly appreciate it. Then there
was the time—" I cut myself short, appalled. I had denied the
living Skunk, only to segue into chatty reminiscences.

There was movement next to me—Toney had
jumped in alarm. I heard him shuffling around, and the next moment
he leaned next to me, paper and pen in hand.

Skunk returned:

"
Get that thing
out of my face
."

"The only thing I've got hanging here
is
my
face," I shot back,
peeved. Surely the editor could do a better job of editing. If his
intention was to convey meaningful information using an old
recording of Skunk, he could have cued up the pertinent segment in
advance. This was so arbitrary it verged on torture. What was
the
message
? 'It's all still
there' was taken out of context.
What
was still all there? Not the Brinks money,
since a fair portion of it had gone off in Kendle's van.

"You mind hurrying this up?" I said into the
phone. "I'm at work. If you—"

I was interrupted by a high-pitched ringing,
steady and monotonous. I could only think of electronic
interference, like the phones melting in Fail Safe. People don't
much meditate on nuclear annihilation these days, but anyone hooked
on old movies would recognize the end of the world.

The sounded ended abruptly with a very
Skunkesqe, "
Aw, shit
,"
followed by a distant tinkling of broken glass.

I waited a moment before responding with a
series of inane "Hello?"s, even though a distinctive click had told
me the caller had hung up. The conversation, such as it was, had
lasted about two minutes.

I lowered the receiver and stared at the
16-buttons jutting out of the phone.

"Crank call?"

I gave a start. Mr. Toney was standing next
to me, but I had completely forgotten his presence.

"Yeah," I said. "I guess."

"Isn't your father..."

My supervisor knew my father was
in situ
on my fireplace mantelpiece,
but I didn't think he knew the particulars of his demise. That may
have been more of a hope on my part, but I didn't bother expanding
on it.

"Dead. Yeah."

"This guy was pretending to be your father?"
Mr. Toney shook his head, but was obviously delighted. If he
couldn't get a life, he could at least intrude on someone else's
death. Dull people are pretty ghoulish at heart. Yeah, I know, the
crow accusing the bird-brain.

"Shouldn't I be getting back to the popcorn
stand?" I said, for once eager to work.

"But this is harassment," said Mr. Toney in a
tone that sounded a lot like harassment. "He called to a government
phone to harass a government employee working on government
property."

"There's no reason to make a federal case out
of it," I said squeamishly, wishing he would drop the subject.

"Commonwealth," Mr. Toney corrected
officiously. He was put out by my unwillingness to go into
conniptions. To be elevated from a common popcorn hustler to a
legally-defined harassed citizen should be cause for celebration.
Instead, I was denying the limelight, which he obviously wanted to
share with me. If we called in the authorities now, he would
undoubtedly hog the proceedings. He wanted to bask in the enormity
of the crime. He would fill in the note-taking detective on the
details of my emotional stress, my tears, my inability to fulfill
the function assigned to me, the foam dripping from my mouth and
staining the government carpets. This would lead to the sort of
questions that cement your sphincter, like why were you harassed in
the first place? Was the caller acting on behalf of a jilted
girlfriend? But wait, skip the conspiracy: was the caller a
jilted
boy
friend? Was this the
result of misbehavior on my part? Or was I being victimized by my
own charm and good looks. Answers would get more and more
unbelievable as I attempted to screen off the truth. And then,
finally, the subject of stolen money would come up:
Ah-hah
! goes the detective.
Oh my
! says Mr. Toney.
Boo-hoo
! says yours truly. No, I had
to put as much space between this crank call and my personal
reality as possible.

"They got the wrong number," I said
blandly.

"Really?" said Mr. Toney, nonplussed.

"If they got the wrong guy, they got the
wrong number," I reasoned. I think I sounded like someone who had
poured sour milk on his Lucky Charms.

Mr. Toney worked this over in his mind,
really hammered and sawed, then held out a sheet from his notepad.
"If you decide to follow up on this, which I highly recommend, this
is who the caller was."

I stared numbly at the phone number he had
written down. Judging my silence to be part and parcel of my
technological illiteracy, he pointed at the phone's LED display.
"Caller ID," he said. "Heavy breathers can't get away with their
games the way they used to."

I was annoyed that he had reduced my
complicated call to the realm of sexual assault, especially as the
caller had not been a woman. Technically speaking, it might be said
I had been talking to myself: the phone number he had written down
was mine. Someone had called me from my house on Oregon Hill.

"You mind if I take off the rest of the
evening?" I said.

"So the call
did
rattle you," said Mr. Toney, inordinately
pleased. "Do you recognize the number?"

"It looks a bit familiar..."

"Let's call the police."

Let's not.

"I think it's something I can take care of,"
I said.

"You think so?" Mr. Tony asked, lifting a
scruffy eyebrow.

"I'd prefer to take care of it on my own," I
elaborated.

Mr. Toney deflated. Doubt requires an act of
will, and his will squiggled out and plopped on the floor. Could he
have less of a life than I did? That would go hand-in-hand with the
profile of a bottom tier government employee. It was a depressing
sight. And enlightening. The hunt for Skunk's treasure had put
meaning and purpose in my life. It might not be a very elevated
kind of purpose, but it had a background and story thread. And
while nothing would probably come of my search, at that moment
something else flashed on my imperceptible mind. I could choose how
to see life.

We've all met people whose lives have been
trashed one way or another, yet managed to smile on their way to
the poorhouse. Usually we shrug them off as mental cases,
delusional nitwits who can't or won't own up to reality. But I grew
up in a neighborhood populated entirely by losers. Perhaps the one
thing I missed most about the old Oregon Hill was its pervasive
atmosphere of cheerful despair. There was too much drunkenness, too
much wife-beating, too many meaningless fistfights in the streets,
the alleys, the bars and any other corner where you could swing
your arms. And yet you never saw so many people smiling, grinning,
haling each other with open cheer. Intruders were eyed with menace
or cynicism. Social instincts showed their negative side whenever a
black strayed into the area—a common bumper sticker of the day was
"Oregon Hill—That Better be a Tan." Tourists visiting the
Confederate graves at historic Hollywood Cemetery were greeted with
knowing smirks. It was as if the locals were saying: "You might
think we're perfect examples of decrepit Southern manhood but our
great grandfathers were the ones who fought that dumb-ass war for
that slavery you love to go on about." They relished their
white-trashness and chose to see it as a virtue. That was my spark
out of the blue. What you choose to see yourself as might not be
very accurate, but it's what you are, or what you become. A
Jehovah's Witness, a Nazi, an upstanding citizen, a Moon pilot—take
your pick. The folks of Oregon Hill were the scum of the earth, and
they rolled in the dirt every day of their unredeemed and
statistically brief lives. If you haven't lucked out in either the
nature or nurture departments, you can still make the most of the
little you're given.

Was that my problem? That I was interpreting
reality for what it was instead of what it could be? You don't have
to go through life without rose-tinted glasses. It's an American
right, practically mandatory in fact, to delude yourself. And why
not? Believing the Earth is flat doesn't mean you'll fall off at
the end.

So I fell in with Mr. Toney, metaphysically
speaking. I suddenly took delight in being part of a grand if
meaningless conspiracy. I was in the midst of an adventure. It
would be sort of pointless if I didn't get all excited about
it.

I had Mr. Toney's permission to skip
the rest of my shift. He overawed me with the suggestion that he
join me to confront the caller, if such was my intention. I wasn't
certain if he knew the call came from my house. If he
did
know, I would have more
emphatically turned down his offer. Besides, he might be AC or DC
or some other unholy combination. There was no sense in
complicating matters.

I had helium in my feet as I walked out of
the museum. I was light and focused. I doubted the caller was still
in my house, but I was full of anticipation. Was there a satchel of
money on my couch? Or had he left me another clue? Maybe something
less arcane, a little more direct. And there was the possibility
that the intruder would, for some unfathomable reason, reverse the
flow of information. Had my house been bugged? Was there a hidden
camera? I might be the center of attention even as I enjoyed the
search. Colder...hotter....

My spirits dipped but were not dashed when I
saw Kendle leaning her big ass against my big assed car in the
employee section of the parking lot. I even managed a jocular
smile. Her expression told me she received it as a sneer. Maybe it
was. My face has had zero practice in the mirror. There's no
telling what was written on it, or how it might be
misinterpreted.

"Yes, I suppose you found it very funny, Mr.
McPherson," she said as I strolled up.

I stopped dead. Was she behind the phone
call? It was only a short drive from the Science Museum to my
house. She could have driven here in the short time I spent fending
off Mr. Toney's inquiries and spirit of volunteerism.

"I," I said. I waited a moment, then said it
again. "I..."

"Don't act dumb," said the detective. "I mean
the money from the old house."

Anything learned well is learned young, and I
was past the age when I could incorporate new ideas with fluid
ease. The thought that I could choose how to see life had gone down
the hatch readily enough, but now I felt the sickening urge to barf
it all back up.

Kendle looked about as amused as day-old
roadkill, with the sour look of death still visible. She could have
been the Road & Track model for my banged up, unwashed
Impala.

"We know that's not all of it," I said.

"We know that's not
any
of it," she responded, flagging me with a
grimace. "The money from the house had traces of cocaine, but
that's no big news."

"Uh...no?" I stuttered.

"Ninety-per cent of all bills in the U.S. has
cocaine on it. It binds to the green dye. That's how ninety-per
cent of drug dealers beat the rap."

That was news to me, so I let go a wow. "You
guys work fast," I added truthfully. "Are we prioritized or
something? Do you use tricorders?"

"We were able to trace some of the bills.
Before they ended up here they were deposited in the Bank Mandiri
of Timor-Leste."

"I don't think I've ever heard of it," I
confessed.

"A branch of the Indonesian state bank in
East Timor." Her eyes weren't so bleary that she couldn't see my
confusion was genuine, although it was actually ignorance.

"East Timor," I said. "Wow."

"It's not in Indiana," she said.

"California?" I ventured.

"Take a sharp right at Australia and a
left at New Guinea. The dollar—
our
dollar—is the legal currency there. I guess they don't have
enough room for their own printing plant."

I made a brief, farewell glance to my
optimism. My thoughts forged ahead briefly before stumbling on a
few crumbs of logic. "You're saying someone took the Brinks money
overseas and traded it in?"

"What, and smuggled it back past customs?
Hello!" Kendle jabbed me with her index finger. Judging from the
pain in my shoulder, I was entitled to a lawsuit. But a winnable
case for police brutality required witnesses, and at that moment
there was no one else around. Besides, only sissies protested
against a poke.

"My department thinks the money was stashed
away and hasn't been seen since," Kendle continued.

"Since what?"

"Four hundred and fifty-four treasury notes
weigh one pound. The bills were all in $100 denomination, meaning
someone would have to smuggle eleven pounds of C-notes through
customs. If you count the missing Brinks money, you've got almost
200 pounds of cash. Now what kind of numbskull would try something
like that?"